By Maria Cramer
Boston Globe
Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company
BOSTON — Crispin McCay, an emergency medical technician, had just finished an uneventful 12-hour shift at the annual Dominican Festival in Franklin Park Sunday evening and was on his way home to Dorchester when he heard a voice crackling over his radio. Someone had just been shot about a block away on Columbia Road.
A young woman had taken a bullet in the neck as she walked near her boyfriend’s house with her 4-year-old son.
McCay rushed to the scene, left his car running near Washington Street, and ran to the woman, who was lying on the sidewalk, bleeding heavily. He pulled gauze from his medical kit, held it to her neck, and tried to keep her conscious with questions. Nearby stood the woman’s son, his clothes covered in her blood.
“I was very nervous for her,” McCay, 38, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “She was very scared.”
The woman, who was not identified by police, is expected to survive. McCay, who rode with her in the ambulance to Boston Medical Center, his hand pressed to her neck, was hailed as a hero by his superiors yesterday.
“Most certainly she wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t stopped,” said Richard Serino, chief of the city’s Emergency Medical Services. “If it wasn’t for his actions, we would have another senseless death in the city.”
McCay later learned that the bullet had severed her carotid artery.
“Another few minutes...,” said Lieutenant Chris Stratton, an EMS spokesman. “He did a great job, and we’re very proud of him.”
Police have made no arrests in the shooting, which happened about 11 p.m. at Washington Street and Columbia Road, where many people often hang out late into the night.
McCay, a 13-year veteran who has been with Boston EMS for 3 1/2 years, had just gone off duty, and when the call came in, he briefly considered driving past the scene of the shooting.
“You don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “A scene like that, it can become very, very difficult to control.”
He also worried the shooter might return.
“I initially was hesitant to stop, but it’s something I would want someone to do for my mother, my father, or my brother,” he said.
The woman was alert and told him she did not know who shot her or why, McCay said.
“I think she was still in plain shock and she couldn’t believe this happened,” he said.
In the ambulance, she asked McCay if her son was OK.
“She told me he was a good kid and she loved him a lot,” he said.
Globe correspondent Ryan Haggerty contributed to this report.